Momma doesn’t love it much because in addition to not really understanding why they do it, she is constantly campaigning to keep people out of the stinking water of the Kristos Samra rock pool. She grumbles that there’s always someone turning up at the clinic a day or two after Timkat whose torn toenail is infected after standing in that pool for a couple of hours, or a young deacon with tummy trouble. There is nothing Momma hates to cope with as much as tummy trouble.
Yesterday we were in the Timkat parade at the crack of dawn with Ezra and Sinidu. All the men in the village beat drums or fire their rifles to make a lot of noise while everyone follows the Beta Markos priests up Beehive Hill – the Sinclair girls all used to join in with their guns when they still lived here. Remember how I said everyone gets dressed up? This year I had to wear one of Fiona Sinclair’s old party dresses. Tartan silk. What a girl Fiona Sinclair is. It is very pretty, but too tight, and the only way they could make me let it out was for Sinidu to sit next to me every morning letting out her own party dress while I did mine.
I am envious of Sinidu’s, which is white muslin with embroidered panels up and down the front. She and Ezra are a beautiful couple. Ezra looked young and earnest in his shamma that Sinidu has scrubbed as white as high summer sun, with a blue and green and silver stripe along the edge. Although I’ve never seen them touch each other even to hold hands – that would be rude for grown-ups to do in public – he treats her like a tiny, bouncy princess. He watches her with joy. He was sad today because she was grouching about having to climb the hill – the baby bump is enormous now. But mainly she had been listening to the radio too much. Now we were all trying to buck her up.
‘Should I stop in the clinic and listen myself?’ Momma asked. ‘Play. Tell me what’s happening!’
‘Nothing,’ Sinidu sulked. ‘There is nothing to listen to.’
‘I had to switch it off myself, or we would have missed the procession,’ Ezra said. ‘It is like watching someone who is drinking too much tej. She just gets sillier and sillier.’
‘What did you hear?’ Momma pressed Sinidu. ‘Anything about the emperor’s request for support from the League of Nations? Have they given him an answer?’
That bickering over the well at the fort near the border with Italian Somaliland turned into a fight last month, just like the Imperial soldier from Gondar said it would. And a lot of soldiers got killed on both sides, just like Sinidu said they would. But it was all local askaris, native soldiers fighting on the Italian side. No Europeans got killed. Just like Momma said they wouldn’t.
‘Oh, the emperor is polite,’ Sinidu grumbled. ‘Haile Selassie wants peace!’
‘We all want peace!’ Momma exclaimed.
‘We don’t want to kneel in church praying for peace while the ferenji soldiers march in and take everything away from us,’ Sinidu said fiercely. ‘Saying prayers is not going to defend our coffee trees and Habte Sadek’s treasure and your flying machine. Italian troops are already marching in Somaliland and Eritrea, we know it, but Haile Selassie wants peace. He apologised for Gondar, and he wants Italy to apologise to him for Wal Wal. And the League of Nations sits in Europe doing nothing! Ugh, they are like my grandmother, like your Teo, polite to everybody.’
Momma laughed uneasily. ‘Haile Selassie is doing the right thing. He’s negotiating. He is a modern leader!’
‘He may as well negotiate with the wind, Rhoda! France and Britain won’t defend him. No one dares to offend Italy, none of the Great Powers in Europe want to offend each other. The British want the emperor to pay Italy again to apologise for making the Italians kill Ethiopian soldiers. Italy’s their ally and they think Germany is going to stir up trouble in Europe and they’ll do anything to keep Mussolini happy. All these words and treaties and none of them work in the emperor’s favour! You know what Habte Sadek says – spiderwebs joined together can catch a lion. That is what they are doing, those Italians, spinning webs.’
Sinidu was getting out of breath. She hugged her arms around her embroidery-covered, hidden baby. ‘I just hope you listen to me and keep your children out of it,’ she told Momma ominously. ‘Don’t let that boy of yours get caught in the spiderweb.’
‘Now stop talking about war or you will upset the baby!’ Ezra warned her.
‘Is that what all that European schooling has taught you about babies?’ Sinidu grumbled. ‘Or do you just spend too much time chatting with those superstitious old women who come complaining to the handsome young doctor about their arthritis?’
At least that made Ezra laugh.
We stayed on Beehive Hill until everybody started heading home – and though it’s only a fancy show, every single time I watch the Timkat parade it makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck to see Habte Sadek carry the Kristos Samra tabot back inside the rock cave church where it hides for most of the year.
Finally the Tazma Meda priests carried their own copy of the tabot back down to the village. Momma peeled us away from the parade as we all trooped past the track to Beehive Farm. She settled into her long-legged lope and once again I had to trot to keep up with her and Teo – of course they were not trying to run wearing one of Fiona Sinclair’s outgrown dresses.
It turns out Momma was determined to get in another flying lesson before it got dark. Sinidu being upset had scared her. Sinidu being unhappy scares her. Sinidu is always happy.
However, only Teo got a lesson yesterday, and afterward Momma told him to log his flight as twenty minutes because that is all he actually flew with his hands on the controls. It should have been longer, but we were not expecting the Uninvited Guests.
Teo is getting very good very fast. I am torn between pride and jealousy. He does it the way he draws, without having to work at it, but also – this is new – he works at it. Momma let him do the take-off by himself and yelled at him to head north, following the Beshlo River. Then Momma levelled out high above the gorge, but not so high above the flat tabletops of the mountains. She yelled through the speaking tube, ‘Let’s climb!’ I was sitting in the back right behind her, with Teo in the pilot’s cockpit. Momma pointed at the sky with both hands. ‘Up! Up! Pull back the stick!’
Teo did, but not with confidence, and we were crawling upward. I started to laugh. Teo glanced back at Momma to get some kind of reassurance that he was doing the right thing, and he spotted me way back in the third cockpit.
I hooked my thumbs together and flapped my hands like wings, trying to remind him he was brave and steady.
Black Dove! I mouthed at him.
And that was all it took. He pulled back, as firm and sure as Momma, and pushed power on and we soared. I heard Momma shouting into the speaking tube.
‘That’s it, Teo – pull back like you mean it!’
Then suddenly the plane lurched wildly, nose up, which none of us had expected. That was because Momma grabbed the controls away from him without realising he was still pulling back.
Teo yelled. I couldn’t hear what – the sound blew past me like leaves or feathers in a gale. It felt like we were going to stall.
‘Let go!’ Momma yelled, and then she straightened us out.
Teo glanced back at her again in wild confusion, but Momma wasn’t paying attention to him any more. She had turned her head to gaze at something on the horizon, a little to the right of where we were heading. From where I was sitting behind her, it looked as though her body had suddenly become a part of the plane. She wasn’t thinking about flying, she was just doing it. It was as natural to her as walking. So I followed her eyes to the horizon to see what she was looking at. I saw a black speck that seemed to hover ahead of us in the middle of the wide blue empty highland sky. Not a vulture.
It was another Romeo.
It is such a familiar silhouette that I watched it coming toward us without realising how weird it was to see another plane at all. How many times have we watched that exact same silhouette floating into the Beehive Hill Farm field, or leaving it behind? A million. A few
thousand anyway.
‘Who is that?’ Teo yelled.
Momma was tense, I could tell. Her head was tilted high, watching the other plane, focused. She gave Teo a sharp thumbs down to shut him up.
She rocked our wings at the other plane as it got closer, a dipping curtsy, one set of wings down and then the other. The mysterious Romeo rocked its wings back at us, everybody waving. Selam, selam – peace!
But Momma still didn’t relax. I thought she’d been tense because she was worried the pilot hadn’t seen us, and she didn’t want to collide with the other aircraft. But she wasn’t worried about having enough room in the enormous sky. She was worried about something else.
She didn’t give Teo the controls back after she’d rocked the wings, even though our plane was still flying straight and level, heading north along the river, and Teo is perfectly capable of flying straight and level without running into anything or losing height. Momma kept flying, leaning forward a little bit in her seat, straining to see the other plane as it came nearer and nearer. When the strange plane got close enough, we could see the other pilot waving at us cheerfully. As he passed us he raised his wings so we could see the Italian flag colours painted underneath.
Momma kept flying, but Teo and I craned around in our seats to watch the other plane. It flew steadily out of sight in a straight line behind us in exactly the opposite direction – heading right toward Beehive Hill. Toward home.
When the strange plane was out of sight, Momma turned steeply and followed.
After a minute or so she said through the speaking tube, in a normal voice, ‘There you go, Teo, you can take her for a few minutes. You have control.’ He did absolutely nothing except keep his hand on the control column. She’d already pointed the plane in the right direction and we kept going until the dark green smudges of the Tazma Meda juniper and coffee trees came back in sight. Then Momma took over so we could land.
She made a big fuss about how to spot the airfield from the air, which I don’t think is so awful hard. We are so close to the spot where the Beshlo River and the Blue Nile meet that it’s hard to get lost unless you go zooming away over the mountains toward the other side of Wollo Province.
I guess I should put in my other book, the flying log, about all the landmarks and cheats she pointed out, how to work out which way the wind is blowing based on her homemade windsock, or how to line yourself up with the radio mast in Tazma Meda village on your port wingtip and the summit of Beehive Hill straight ahead of you. But actually I wasn’t paying enough attention to what she was saying and Teo confessed to me later that he doesn’t remember any of it. We were both staring at the strange airplane on the ground below us.
The mysterious Romeo had got there ahead of us, landed and parked. We could see two men standing on the smooth, trampled dirt in front of the aircraft shed. They were squinting up at us, shading their eyes with their hands.
Momma landed and the two men stood aside as we trundled past them on our way to the shed. We didn’t wave the ends of our shammas at them like we would have if it was Sinidu or the Sinclairs, but we got a good look at them.
One of them was Papà Menotti. I was surprised at how happy this made me. We hardly know him.
The other was about Papà’s age, also a white man, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses with round lenses that made him look like a bug. Both men waved wildly to us as we taxied past and Teo and I waved back, but Momma didn’t.
Momma stopped the engine and coasted to a stop just before she reached the shed door. The men strode across to catch up with us and after we’d climbed out of the plane and taken our goggles off, Momma said hello to her husband.
‘Why, Orsino! And . . . is this –’
The other fellow archly lowered his bug sunglasses down his nose for about half a second.
‘Not Capitano Adessi?’ Momma paused as if she was at a loss for words and finally came up with, in English: ‘Well . . . Happy New Year!’
Papà Menotti said only, ‘Rhoda!’
They didn’t rush into each other’s arms. Instead, Momma held out her hand and Papà lifted it very grandly to his lips and kissed it. I gaped. Teo whispered to me, ‘If we ever see Grandma again I will do that . . .’
‘Ha!’ It would melt her. ‘I can’t wait!’
The other man, Capitano Adessi, turned to look at me. He said something in Italian and then followed up in English, ‘Orsino’s daughter? What a lovely young lady you have become, Emilia!’
I took an instant dislike to him. Of all the costumes he could have possibly have complimented, not one of them included head-to-toe dust, my hair standing on end, wearing Fiona Sinclair’s let-out-at-the-sides, too-short party dress. And I was kind of jealous of his fancy sunglasses too.
‘Yes, this is my clever Emilia,’ Momma said coolly, turning everything he’d just said right round – complimenting me without mentioning the dust, and pointing out that I am hers, not Papà’s. ‘When did you last see Emilia? It must have been in France when she was a baby, when you came to visit us with Orsino’s parents. You must have met Delia and Teo too!’ She gestured to Teo, her face smooth and neutral. ‘Well, Delia was killed a couple of years after we went back to the States and Teo is my boy now. And I’m teaching him to fly.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Capitano Adessi,’ Teo said, holding out his hand. Adessi hesitated a second or so – we all saw it. But then he shook hands with Teo coolly. The second he let go, Papà kissed us both, which completely covered up Adessi’s hesitation.
Momma gave a brief nod, satisfied with these introductions and greetings. ‘Please excuse us while we tuck the airplane into bed,’ she said.
‘Let us assist you, of course,’ Captain Adessi offered, and Papà nodded eagerly, and we all wheeled the Romeo – our one, I mean – into the shed. We heaved the doors shut. Then we helped Adessi and Papà to tie down their plane.
And then we had to invite them into the house.
‘Will you stay for supper?’ Momma said.
‘We don’t have to go back until Monday,’ Adessi answered for both of them.
‘Back to where?’ Momma asked politely. ‘You weren’t flying out of Italian Somaliland today, were you? That’s much too far to fly in a day!’
‘We have been moved to Eritrea,’ Captain Adessi said. ‘Orsino is so pleased to be closer to you and his beautiful daughter.’
‘Eritrea!’
I couldn’t tell if she was pleased or angry or scared, since her tone was completely neutral. Well, maybe a little too chipper. But the worried dent wasn’t there between her eyes. Since the moment he’d offered to shake hands with Captain Adessi, Teo had been quietly polite. I was dying to ask him what he thought was going on.
‘You can stay the night, and we can catch up on old times.’ Momma beamed at Papà. She still hadn’t said a word he could understand. He beamed back at her.
Captain Adessi didn’t return Momma’s smile. ‘There is some business your husband would like to attend to with you, Signora Menotti. I have come along to help him with the translation.’
Momma said something in cool French, something like, We don’t need help communicating. Papà agreed with her eagerly, and Adessi stood there looking blank.
‘Orsino and I both speak French,’ Momma explained.
‘But Emilia does not, so I understand,’ Adessi said apologetically.
‘Neither does Teo,’ I butted in. I wanted to paste him.
Momma walked up to the Sinclairs’ house with Captain Adessi on one side of her and Papà Menotti on the other. Adessi chattered enthusiastically about the Timkat ceremony he’d seen last year in Gondar, and how sorry he was about the attack on the Italian Consulate in Gondar two months ago, which meant it had been prudent for him to give this year a miss. Teo and I followed behind everybody else. I nudged Teo in the ribs and shook my head in a silent question. What is going on?
Beats me, he shrugged for an answer.
Papà Menotti suddenly threw a lot of French
at Momma. She turned to look at him, startled, and shook her head. He beamed at her like a saint painted on a church wall until she gave him a quick, desperate, frightened grin in return. Then he threw back his head and laughed. Papà glanced around over his shoulder and winked at me.
Momma stepped up on to the Sinclairs’ big foreign-looking porch. She turned around and said, ‘The house is empty at the moment. Everybody is at the Timkat procession. Come up and sit on the porch and we can have a drink.’ She glanced at Papà Menotti, who smiled encouragingly at her like he was saying, Go on! The little worried dent appeared between her eyebrows. She looked down at me and Teo.
‘Kids, can I talk to you for a moment? Excuse me, Orsino.’
She marched with determination around the side of the veranda and we followed her through the double glass doors into the dining room.
‘I’m sorry, kids, we’ll have to have a quiet supper here tonight instead of going to the Timkat feast.’
‘Oh, Momma, that’s mean!’ I said.
‘Sinidu will be upset,’ Teo reminded her.
‘I know, and I’m not happy about it either. But Orsino wants to talk and he’s only here till tomorrow. He wants to make the Adessi fellow think this is our house. That he is coming home here to his family. Jiminy Christmas! How the heck am I supposed to pretend this pile of gingerbread belongs to me?’
Momma is terrible at bluffing. She has the worst poker face in the world.
But actually, what I like best about Papà Menotti is his love of dressing things up, and pretending is what me and Teo are best at. There was no way I wasn’t going to play along.
I told Momma soothingly, ‘Me and Teo will take care of everything. You don’t have to pretend a thing! Just be yourself. Don’t talk about the house. We’ll fix up Bea and Vera’s bedroom for Adessi. We’ll clear out their guns and Vera’s comics and borrow some of Mrs Sinclair’s scarves to decorate.’
‘But we have to figure out supper!’ Momma wailed. ‘Why can’t we just all go to the Timkat feast? Sinidu will miss us and she will be insulted. And this kitchen is empty and all we have at home is tef flour for injera and it won’t be ready to eat for days.’